Already paid for your site to be built and think the cost conversation is over? Nice thought, but a website is a bit like a garden — building it is one thing, maintaining it is a separate, recurring expense. Let’s break it into concrete line items so you know exactly what you’re signing up for.
Fixed costs you pay no matter what
Domain
40-100 PLN per year, depending on the extension (pl is usually cheaper than, say, com or more exotic ones). This is one of those costs you simply can’t avoid — your domain is your address on the internet, and it needs to be renewed every year so it doesn’t end up in the hands of someone who was just waiting for you to forget.
Hosting
150-600 PLN per year for a simple brochure site on shared hosting. More demanding applications (with a database, high traffic) may need a VPS, which pushes the cost up to 600-2,000+ PLN per year, depending on server specs.
SSL certificate
Today, in most cases, free (Let's Encrypt, auto-renewing), so if someone tries to charge you separately for this, it’s worth asking why.
Costs that show up depending on your needs
Updates and security patches
If your site runs on WordPress or something similar, regular updates to plugins and the core are necessary for security — a neglected site is an easy target for automated attacks. Cost: starting at 50 PLN/month for basic upkeep, more for larger sites.
Backups
Some hosting providers do this automatically as part of the plan; others require a separate service or plugin — usually a few dozen PLN a month if it’s not already included.
Technical support / small changes
If you don’t edit the site yourself and occasionally need a small fix (a text change, adding a photo), it’s worth having an agreed rate with your provider — whether that’s hourly billing or a fixed monthly package.
A real example for a simple brochure site
| Item | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| Domain | 60 PLN |
| Hosting | 300 PLN |
| SSL | 0 PLN (free) |
| Basic technical upkeep | 600 PLN (50 PLN/mo) |
| Total | ~960 PLN/year |
That’s roughly 80 PLN a month — for comparison, less than more than one streaming subscription combined, and yet plenty of people are surprised that a website “costs something” after they’ve already paid for it once.
Where people most often try to cut corners (and why it backfires)
- The cheapest possible hosting with no technical upkeep — works fine, until it doesn’t. A site that never gets updated is just a matter of time before it gets hacked or breaks after a change on the host’s server.
- No backups — if something goes wrong (see the earlier post about WordPress), the difference between “I restore a backup in 5 minutes” and “I start from scratch” is often hundreds of PLN and several days of stress.
Want to know what maintaining your website would realistically cost? Tell me what hosting and system you’re currently on — we’ll work it out together.